Atul Vyas was an outstanding CMC student who was majoring in Mathematics and Physics. He tragically lost his life in a train crash that occurred on September 12, 2008 in Chatsworth, California. The Mathematical Sciences Department at CMC fondly remembers Atul as someone who was equally excited by the power of mathematical abstraction and the […]
In this talk, I'll attempt to give an introduction to the beautiful world of tropical geometry. As an application, I'll describe work with Siddarth Kannan (Pomona 2018) and Shiyue Li (Mudd 2017) using tropical geometry to compute the cohomology of certain moduli spaces, called heavy/light Hassett spaces, which are of interest in a wide range of […]
David Hilbert's Grundlagen der Geometrie is a rare example of a historical mathematics text that is still profitably read today and continues to inspire research in mathematics, computer science, and philosophy. The effort of publishing an English translation of Hilbert in 1902 involved a diverse swath of the American mathematical community. Edgar Jerome Townsend completed a first draft […]
In 1897, Indiana physician Edwin J. Goodwin believed he had discovered a way to square the circle, and proposed a bill to Indiana Representative Taylor I. Record which would secure […]
Opioid addiction has become a national health crisis in recent years, with involvement in 66% of all drug overdose deaths in 2016 and high economic costs. In contrast to the dynamics of a classic disease or illicit drug epidemic, opioid addiction has its roots in legal, prescription medication - a fact which greatly increases the […]
Many problems, arising in discrete and metric geometry, signal processing, physics, etc, can be reformulated as questions of optimizing discrete or continuous measures. We shall review some of such conjectures, […]
Knotting in living organisms is a feature that is visible to the careful observer of biological life. Since the 1970’s, with the increasing power of electron microscopes, scientists have been able to capture images of such structures in living organisms at near atomic levels. We will explore the mathematics of knotting that has provided tools study these […]
What do swarm robotics and political redistricting have in common? One answer is Markov chains, which have recently been used in very different ways to address problems in both these […]
